Reconciling Work and Wildness. From the title of this book the reader
might be fooled into thinking this is a self-help book of some sort,
but no! This is unadulterated navel-gazing autobiography. Williams's
philosophy of nature seems to be that it is better to be out in the
wilderness than stuck in an office, and he comes to this realization
after a lifetime of unhappily trying to do what's expected of him (i.e.
work for a living). At his worst Williams is a whiner and a chauvnist,
but he does clearly lay out the struggle that many people feel when
they have to work a job that they hate just so they can live to do the
things that they love. There are really no easy ways to find a
balance there, methinks.
The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations
or more. A form without history has no power to perpetuate itself.
What has no past can have no future. At the core of our life is the
history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but
only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out.
—Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plains
| 
Heidi J. De Vries
